Week 4

The Humanities classroom is more of a multidisciplinary program; however, the teacher does strive to bring an interdisciplinary approach to her teaching.

It is multidisciplinary in that the students often learn about innovations in various disciplines that all relate to the same era of history. For example, we just finished reading the Shakespeare play Much Ado About Nothing after studying artists such as da Vinci, Raphael, and Michelangelo, and poets like Keats and Shelly. Though many disciplines are taught, this is done separately. They are grouped by the historic era in which they occur. We will be moving on to the Baroque period now, and artists such as Caravaggio will be studied, then we will learn about philosophers like Descartes. In this sense it is a multidisciplinary classroom.

However, the teacher is doing a great job of trying to work through the curriculum with a sense of interdisciplinarity. This is done by examining the motifs of progress that occur within each of the disciplines studied, and how that ties to the changes within the others. We find common ground between all the disciplines in the idea of progress. Therefore, by studying the progress in all the disciplines of the era, we can see how the western world has changed socially and culturally.

The disciplines taught are clearly outlined by the teacher. Today may be architecture, tomorrow music, and the next day may be religion. They are taught as distinct disciplines whose boundaries are crossed only after a thorough examination of two or more.

The structure of the classroom is definitely hierarchical. The teacher is the head and the students do as she says. I fall somewhere between the two. And of course the school is hierarchically arranged. In this case, the teacher near the bottom of the pyramid, with me and her students rounding out the list.